1

Six Nights of Poetry

ORNAMENTAL FROG —Joyce Odam,

In a small green sink-jar

filled with water and

gray river stones I keep

an old glass frog

with one foot missing—

happy there, I think.

***

INVISIBLE

—Jeanine Stevens, Sacramento

The day I became

invisible, I walked

into a small photo shop, rang a bell

for service, no one came. I stopped to visit a colleague

on campus, students swarmed around him,

I slipped out unnoticed.

Through glass, I saw a friend engrossed

in a meeting. I left

with a cup of water

from the cooler, then wandered to a park, watched

ducks, an older woman also sat,

bent, a spot of blood,

the size of a nickel, seeped from her arm.

"I'm not hurt, just

old, my skin breaks

easily." I felt I tiptoed at the edge of things,

anonymous, it was

somehow peaceful.

***

2

In the distance

frogs croak in the mountain rice fields, The evening's single song.

~~~

Unable to sleep, I hear the voice of a young deer

Rising from a mountain ridge.

~~~

The branches that will be used for this

autumn's firewood are still blooming. Please gather some summer grasses, wet with dew,

and come visit me.

~~~

Not much to offer you—

just a lotus flower floating In a small jar of water.

~~~

In the pond near my hut the lotus flowers, covered with dew, Bloom in a row.

~~~

The willows are in full bloom! I want to pile up the blossoms

Like mountain snow.

In a summer meadow

blossoming in a thicket the red starlily: this unrevealed love

such a painful thing! —Lady Otomo of Sakanoe

I hug a stone burnt in a fire—

a dream of autumn.

—Kanajo Hasegawa

in the summer field

that person with deep feelings

and a sober face —Sonojo

3

the moon and I

alone are left here

cooling on the bridge —Kikusha

In spirit and in truth silent prayer...just

the moon on the road —Kikusha

***

THE WHIPPING WOMAN

The woman I hire to daughter my mother makes bi-weekly visits to the dementia ward

Lies down beside the near-still waters

Accepts the mouth kisses wet with drool

From where gravelly words

dribble down washed-out gullies

Like a whipping boy she bears the brunt

of each face-to-face flagellation

that my rawhide flesh refuses

And for twenty dollars an hour I purchase like the contraposition of a professional mourner Substitution for services I can't supply

***

THE DEAD IN FROCK COATS —Carlos Drummond de Andrade

In the corner of the living room was an album of unbearable photos,

many meters high and infinite minutes old, over which everyone leaned making fun of the dead in frock coats.

Then a worm began to chew the indifferent coats,

the pages, the inscriptions, and even the dust on the pictures.

The only thing it did not chew was the everlasting sob of life that broke and broke from those pages

***

BOY CRYING IN THE NIGHT

—Carlos Drummond de Andrade

In the warm, humid night, noiseless and dead, a boy cries.

4

His crying behind the wall, the light behind the window

are lost in the shadow of muffled footsteps, of tired voices.

Yet the sound of medicine poured into a spoon can be heard.

A boy cries in the night, behind the wall, across the street, far away a boy cries, in another city, in another world, perhaps.

And I see the hand that llifts the spoon while the other holds the head,

and I see the slick thread run down the boy's chin,

and slip into the street, only a thread, and slip through the city. And nobody else in the world exists but that boy crying.

***

This is an excerpt from his "Looking For Poetry":

Enter the kingdom of words as if you were deaf. Poems are there that want to be written.

They are dormant, but don't be let down,

their virginal surfaces are fresh and serene.

They are alone and mute, in dictionary condition. Live with your poems before you write them.

If they're vague, be patient. If they offend, be calm.

Wait untiil each one comes into its own and demolishes with its command of words

and its command of silence. Don't force poems to let go of limbo. Don't pick up lost poems from the ground.

Don't fawn over poems. Accept them as you would their final and definitive form,

distilled in space.

***

MUSE

—Todd Cirillo, Grass Valley Reading the poems

of my past to her

she says

“I had to go through a lot of pain for those.”

“I know,” I said.

Me too.

***

APPLES

—Ron Tranquilla, Grass Valley

5

A boy, I climbed the neighborhood

apple tree; it lifted me to its shoulders so I could see my school, our church,

the candy store. Leaning, holding on tightly, I had apples easily at hand.

A boy perched in the trombones, I thought that girl with the pony tail

in the second row of saxes was cute.

I didn’t know then that I would be winded

climbing such a little hill, the path lifting

beside little houses all the same, all fruits

gone. I didn’t know that I would fall in love with the saxophonist, or that she

would be climbing at my side, as I

lean on her, holding on for dear life.

***

POEM ON BREAD —Vernon Scannell

The poet is about to write a poem; He does not use a pencil or a pen.

He dips his long, thin finger into jam Or something savoury preferred by men. This poet does not choose to write on paper;

He takes a single slice of well-baked bread And with his jam or marmite-nibbed forefinger

He writes his verses down on that instead.

His poem is fairly short as all the best are. When he has finished it he hopes that you

Or someone else—your brother, friend or sister—

Will read and find it marvelous and true.

If you can't read, then eat: it tastes quite good. If you do neither, all that I can say Is he who needs no poetry or bread

Is really in a devilish bad way.

***

BUSINESS AS USUAL

—Kenneth Fearing

This is the poet Who wrote the sonnet

And was paid three dollars

And sixty-five cents.

This is the artist,

6

The man who has drawn it

(For twenty-five bucks)

A margin of nymphs— The nymphs in the sonnet

That earned three dollars And sixty-five cents.

Here is the printer Who published the page

(Clearing upon it

A hundred or so) Of nymphs, and the sonnet

That earned three dollars

And sixty-five cents.

This is the empty

Bottle of gin

That cost three dollars And sixty-five cents

That enabled the poet

To write the sonnet

That earned three dollars And sixty-five cents.

***

THE MOON IN YOUR HANDS —H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)

If you take the moon in your hands

and turn it round

(heavy, slightly tarnished platter) you're there;

if you pull dry sea-weed from the sand

and turn it round and wonder at the underside's bright amber, your eyes

look out as they did here,

(you don't remember)

when my soul turned round,

perceiving the other-side of everything,

mullein-leaf, dogwood-leaf, moth-wing

and dandelion-seed under the ground.

***

Fame is a bee.

It has a song—

7

It has a sting—

Ah, too, it has a wing. Emily:

***

INTERRUPTION IN THE GOOD TIME OF KAIROS —Elsie Whitlow Feliz

Every time I start to write a poem somone knocks at the door. They want to give

me something—usually God. I must explain I already have God, rather

She has me, and I was busy with Her

work when they interrupted, and She's

going to get them if they don't start

moving. Oh, they say, you don't mean

that you think God is a woman? That's

when God comes to the door to stand

by me. They don't like the look in

Her eyes. We'll see you later, they say.

When Hell freezes over, God says, and

we go back to the work of writing.

***

I AM THE FIRST

—Paul Celan

I am the first to drink of the blue that still looks for its eye.

I drink from your footprint and see:

you roll through my fingers, pearl, and you grow! You grow, as do all the forgotten. You roll: the black hailstone of sadness

is caught by a kerchief turned white with waving goodbye

***

DIATRIBE AGAINST THE DEAD

—Angel Gonzalez

The dead are selfish: they make us cry and don't care,

they stay quiet in the most inconvenient places,

they refuse to walk, we have to carry them on our backs to the tomb

as if they were children. What a burden!

8

Unusually rigid, their faces

accuse us of something, or warn us;

they are the bad conscience, the bad example, they are the worst things in our lives always, always.

The bad thing about the dead is that there is no way you can kill them. Their constant destructive labor

is for that reason incalculable. Insensitive, distant, obstinate, cold,

with their insolence and their silence

they don't realize what they undo

***

BEFORE I COULD CALL MYSELF ANGEL GONZALEZ

—Angel Gonzalez

Before I could call myuself Angel Gonzalez,

before the earth could support the weight of my body,

a long time

and a great space were necessary: men from all the seas and all the lands,

fertile wombs of women, and bodies

and more bodies, incessantly fusing into another new body.

Solstices and equinoxes illuminated with their changing lights, and variegated skies, the millenary trip of my flesh

as it climbed over centruies and bones. Of its slow and painful journey,

of its escape to the end, surviving

shipwrecks, anchoring itself to the last sign of the dead,

I am only the result, the fruit,

what's left, rotting, among the remains;

what you see here, is just that: tenacious trash resisting

its ruin, fighting against wind, walking streets that go

nowhere. The success

of all failures. The insane force of dismay...

***

WHATEVER YOU WANT

—Angel Gonzalez

When you have money, buy me a ring,

when you have nothing, give me a corner of your mouth,

9

when you don't know what to do, come with me

—but later don't say you didn't know what you were doing.

In the morning you gather bundles of firewood

and they turn into flowers in your arms. I hold you up grasping the petals, if you leave I'll take away your perfume.

But I've already told you:

if you decide to leave, here's the door:

its name is Angel and it leads to tears.

***

CITY —Angel Gonzalez

Things glisten. Roof tiles rise over the tree tops.

Almost to the breaking point, tense,

the resilient streets.

There you are: beneath the intersection of metallic cables,

where the sun fits like a halo

complimenting your image. Rapid swallows threaten

impassive facades. Glass transmits luminous and secretive messages.

Everything consists of brief, invisible gestures for habitual eyes.

And suddenly you're not there. Good-bye, love, good-bye.

You're already gone. Nothing remains of you. The city rotates:

grinder in which everything is undone.

***

THE DRUNK AND THE MADMAN —Rumi

I'm lost in your face, in your lost eyes. The drunk and the madman inside me

take a liking to each other. They sit down

on the ground together. Look at this mess

of a life as the sun looks fondly into ruins.

With one glance many trees grow from a single seed.

Your two eyes are like a Turk born in Persia. He's on a rampage, a Persian shooting Turkish arrows.

He has ransacked my house so that no lives here anymore,

10

just a boy running barefooted all through it.

Your face is a garden that comes up where the house was. With our hands we tear down houses and make bare places.

The moon has no desire to be described. No one needs this poetry. The loose hair-strands of a beautiful woman

don't have to be combed.

***

UNMARKED BOXES

—Rumi

Don't grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form. The child weaned from mother's milk

now drinks wine and honey mixed.

God's joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box,

from cell to cell. As rainwater, down into flowerbed.

As roses, up from ground.

Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish, now a cliff covered with vines,

now a horse being saddled.

It hides within these, till one day it cracks them open.

Part of the self leaves the body when we sleep and changes shape. You might say, "Last night

I was a cypress tree, a small bed of tulips, a field of grapevines." Then the phantasm goes away.

You're back in the room.

I don't want to make any one fearful. Hear what's behind what I say.

Tatatumtum tatum tatadum.

There's the light gold of wheat in the sunh and the gold of bread made from that wheat. I have neither. I'm only talking about them,

as a town in the desert looks up

at stars on a clear night.

_______________________________

A few Rumi "quatrains":

(1127)

I drink streamwater and the air

becomes clearer and everything I do.

I become a waterwheel,

11

turning and tasting you, as long

as water moves.

(914) Come to the orchard in Spring. There is light and wine, and sweethearts in the pomegranate flowers.

If you do not come, these do not matter. If you do come, these do not matter.

(82)

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty

and frightened. Don't open the door to the study

and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

***

THE END AND THE BEGINNING

—Wislawa Szymborska

After every war

someone's got to tidy up. Things won't pick themselves up, after all.

Someone's got to shove

the rubble to the roadsides

so the carts loaded with corpses can get by.

Someone's got to trudge

through sludge and ashes, through the sofa springs, the shards of glass,

the bloody rags.

Someone's got to lug the post

to prop the wall, someone's got to glaze the window,

set the door in its frame.

No sound bites, no photo opportunities and it takes years.

All the cameras have gone

to other wars.

The bridges need to be rebuilt,

12

the railroad stations, too.

Shirt sleeves will be rolled

to shreds.

Someone, broom in hand, still remembers how it was. Someone else listens, nodding

his unshattered head. But others are bound to be bustling nearby

who'll find all that

a little boring.

From time to time someone still must

dig up a rusted argument

from underneath a bush and haul it off to the dump.

Those who knew what this was all about

must make way for those

who know little.

And less than that. And at last nothing less

than nothing.

Someone's got to lie there

in the grass that covers up the causes and effects with a cornstalk in his teeth,

gawking at clouds.

—translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

***

UNEXPECTED MEETING

—Wislawa Szymborska We are very polite to each other,

insist it's nice meeting after all these years.

Our tigers drink milk.

Our hawks walk on the ground. Our sharks drown in water.

Our wolves yawn in front of the open cage.

Our serpents have shaken off lightning,

monkeys—inspiration, peacocks—feathers. The bats—long ago now—have flown out of our hair.

We fall silent in mid-phrase, smiling beyong salvation.

Our people

13

have nothing to say.

***

TO EDWARD DAHLBERG —Jack Kerouac

Don't use the telephone. People are never ready to answer it.

Use poetry.

Amy Lowell:

***

TIME

Looking at myself in my metal mirror, I saw, faintly outlined,

The figure of a crane

Engraved upon its back.

A YEAR PASSES

Beyond the porcelain fence of the pleasure garden,

I hear the frogs in the blue-green ricefields; But the sword-shaped moon Has cut my heart in two.

AUTUMN

All day I have watched the purple vine-leaves

Fall into the water.

And now in the moonlight they still fall,

But each leaf is fringed with silver. Can you handle one more?

***

THE TAXI —Amy Lowell

When I go away from you

The world beats dead Like a slackened drum.

I call out for you against the jutted stars

And shout into the ridges of the wind. Streets coming fast,

One after the other,

14

Wedge you away from me.

And the lamps of the city prick my eyes

So that I can no longer see your face. Why should I leave you,

To wound myself upon the sharp edges of the night? ***

THE LETTER

—Amy Lowell

Little cramped words scrawling all over the paper

Like draggled fly's legs,

What can you tell of the flaring moon

Through the oak leaves? Or of my uncurtained window and the bare floor

Spattered with moonlight?

Your silly quirks and twists have nothing in them Of blossoming hawthorns,

And this paper is dull, crisp, smooth, virgin of loveliness

Beneath my hand.

I am tired, Beloved, of chafing my heart against

The want of you;

Of squeezing it into little inkdrops, And posting it.

And I scald alone, here, under the fire Of the great moon.

***

AFTERGLOW

—Amy Lowell

Peonies

The strange pink colour of Chinese porcelains;

Wonderful—the glow of them. But, my Dear, it is the pale blue larkspur Which swings windily against my heart.

Other Summers— And a cricket chirping in the grass.

***

A DECADE

—Amy Lowell

When you came, you were like red wine and honey,

And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness.

Now you are like morning bread, Smooth and pleasant.

I hardly taste you at all for I know your savour,

15

But I am completely nourished.

***

THE BARE TREE —William Carlos Williams

The bare cherry tree higher than the roof

last year produced

abundant fruit. But how speak of fruit confronted

by that skeleton?

Though live it may be

there is no fruit on it. Therefore chop it down

and use the wood

against this biting cold.

***

REFLECTIVE —A.R. Ammons

I found a weed

that had a mirror in it

and that mirror

looked in at a mirror

in

me that had a weed in it

***

A COAT —William Butler Yeats

I made my song a coat

Covered with embroideries Out of old mythologies

From heel to throat;

But the fools caught it, Wore it in the world's eye

As though they'd wrought it.

16

Song, let them take it,

For there's more enterprise

In walking naked.

Like An Elephant's Tail Six from Dogen (1200-1253):

The moon reflected

In a mind clear As still water:

Even the waves, breaking,

Are reflecting its light.

***

A white heron Hiding itself

In the snowy field,

Where even the winter grass

Cannot be seen.

***

If you ask,

What is Buddha? An icicle Hanging

From a mosquito net.

***

Magpie building

Its nest on his head,

While a spider's web,

Like tiny crabs, Covers his eyebrows.

***

The world—

Like an elephant's tail Not passing through the window,

Although no one is there

Holding it back.

***

Contemplating the clear moon Reflecting a mind empty as the open sky—

Drawn by its beauty,

17

I lose myself

In the shadows it casts.

SMALL SONG

—A.R. Ammons The reeds give

way to the

wind and give

the wind away.

***

CARNATIONS —Charles Bukowski

my love brought me 2 carnations my love brought me red

my love brought me her

my love told me not to worry

my love told me not to die

my love is 2 carnations on a table

while listening to Schoenberg on an evening darkening into night

my love is young the carnations burn in the dark;

she is gone leaving the taste of almonds her body tastes like almonds

2 carnations burning red as she sits far away

now dreaming of china dogs

tinkling through her fingers

my love is ten thousand carnations burning my love is a hummingbird sitting that quiet moment

on the bough as the cat

crouches.

***

STYLE —Charles Bukowski

style is the answer to everything— a fresh way to approach a dull or a

dangerous thing.

18

to do a dull thing with style

is preferable to doing a dangerous thing

without it.

Joan of Arc had style John the Baptist Christ

Socrates Caesar,

Garcia Lorca.

style is the difference,

a way of doing,

a way of being done.

6 herons standing quietly in a pool of water

or you walking out of the bathroom naked

without seeing me.

***

GONE

—R.S. Thomas

There was a flower blowing and a hand plucked it.

There was a stream flowing and a body smirched it.

There was a pure mirror of water and a face came

and looked in it. There were words

and wars and treaties, and feet trampled the earth and the wheels

seared it; and an explosion

followed. There was dust

and silence; and out of the dust

a plant grew, and the dew formed

upon it; and a stream seeped

from the dew to construct

a mirror, and the mirror was empty.

***

19

SUDDENLY

—R.S. Thomas

Suddenly after long silence

he has become voluble. He addresses me from a myriad directions with the fluency

of water, the articulateness of green leaves; and in the genes,

too, the components

of my existence. The rock, so long speechless, is the library

of his poetry. He sings to me

in the chain-saw, writes

with the surgeon's hand on the skin's parchment messages

of healing. The weather

is his mind's turbine driving the earth's bulk round

and around on its remedial

journey. I have no need

to despair; as at some second Pentecost

of a Gentile, I listen to the things

round me: weeds, stones, instruments, the machine itself, all

speaking to me in the vernacular of the purposes of One who is.

***

HAVE YOU EVER KISSED A PANTHER

—Charles Bukowski

this woman thinks she's a panther

and sometimes when we are making love

she'll snarl and spit and her hair comes down and she looks out from the strands

and shows me her fangs but I kiss her anyhow and continue to love.

have you ever kissed a panther?

have you ever seen a female panther enjoying the act of love?

you haven't loved, friend.

you with your squirrels and chipmunks

and elephants and sheep. you ought to sleep with a panther

you'll never again want

squirrels, chipmunks, elephants, sheep, fox, wolverines,

never anything but the female panther

20

the female panther walking across the room

the female panther walking across your soul

all other love songs are lies when that black smooth fur moves against you

and the sky falls down against your back, the female panther is the dream arrived real and there's no going back

or wanting to— the fur up against you,

the search over

and you are locked against the eyes of a panther.

***

SHORT ORDER —Charles Bukowski

I took my girlfriend to your last poetry reading, she said.

yes, yes? I asked.

she's young and pretty, she said.

and? I asked. she hated your

guts.

then she stretched out on the couch

and pulled off her boots.

I don't have very good legs, she said.

all right, I thought, I don't have very good poetry; she doesn't have very good

legs.

scramble two ***

A KISS REFUSED

—Sinh Quang Le, Sacramento

Since Eve

Embraced the apple and kissed it,

The Lord was angry.

When Adam Embraced and kissed her apple,

He was chased by the Lord

Out of Eden.

Aware that kissing is a sin,

21

Today—still there is a fool

Who enjoys kissing the apple

Though only once But he has been refused

As she is afraid She could not enter into Paradise.

***

GET OVER IT

—A.R. Ammons

I guess old men aren't really good for nothing:

they can cuddle, shuffle, and look

about for where it all went: harmless, they

are attractive, gently innocent, on park benches

or subways, or on the slow side of streets:

women are reassured by them; they are witnesses

without danger, guardian angels: out of the game, earnings free, they are what they earned

before: they hardly compete at all: their toothless mouths need no upkeep, no reconstructions,

no root canals or extraordinary measures: it doesn't matter if their piss-burnt pants

stiffen up or if they seldom shave or use much

hot water: they are wonderfully inexpensive:

unless, of course, something goes wrong: they

just hang out on corners or in alleys, useless,

apologetic, inexcusable, supernumerary, invisible among the seeing: what good is a mess

of stuff on its way out, nearly out: get on out, you might say, you're taking up room:

but old men are good examples to the young of what becomes of things: working, loving,

buying, living the dynamics, many can look

down the steep gradient of the slope to where

the rubbish edges the river and then reaffirmed

they can look back into the lights and run

along to do their parts: when I started this

22

piece, I intended under the guise of praise

to pour the world's comtempt on old men, but I wasn't clever enough to modulate it gradually

the way, say, Shakespeare moves easefully through changing weathers: but at times, old

men will look up at the world, raise an eyebrow

and smile a small smile hard to read.

***

IN VIEW OF THE FACT

—A.R. Ammons

The people of my time are passing away: my

wife is baking for a funeral, a 60-year-old who

died suddenly, when the phone rings, and it's

Ruth we care so much about in intensive care:

it was once weddings that came so thick and

fast, and then, first babies, such a hullabaloo:

now, it's this that and the other and somebody

else gone or on the brink: well, we never thought we would live forever (although we did)

and now it looks like we won't: some of us

are losing a leg to diabetes, some don't know

what they went downstairs for, some know that

a hired watchful person is around, some like

to touch the cane tip into something steady,

so nice: we have already lost so many, brushed the loss of ourselves ourselves: our

address books for so long a slow scramble now

are palimpsests, scribbles and scratches: our

index cards for Christmases, birthdays,

Halloweens drop clean away into sympathies:

at the same time we are getting used to so many leaving, we are hanging on with a grip

to the ones left: we are not giving up on the congestive heart failure or brain tumors, on

23

the nice old men left in empty houses or on

the widows who decide to travel a lot: we

think the sun may shine someday when we'll

drink wine together and think of what used to be: until we die we will remember every

single thing, recall every word, love every

loss: then we will, as we must, leave it to

others to love, love that can grow brighter

and deeper til the very end, gaining strength

and getting more precious all the way....

***

CONSUMMATION OF GRIEF —Charles Bukowski

I even hear the mountains

the way they laugh up and down their blue sides

and down in the water

the fish cry and all the water

is their tears. I listen to the water on nights I drink away

and the sadness becomes so great I hear it in my clock

it becomes knobs upon my dresser

it becomes paper on the floor it becomes a shoehorn

a laundry ticket

it becomes

cigarette smoke climbing a chapel of dark vines...

it matters little

very little love is not so bad

or very little life

what counts

is waiting on walls

I was born for this

I was born to hustle roses down the avenues of the dead.

***

24

AN ANCIENT GESTURE

—Edna St. Vincent Millay

I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron:

Penelope did this too. And more than once: you can't keep weaving all day And undoing it all through the night;

Your arms get tired, and the back of your neck gets tight; And along towards morning, when you think it will never be light,

And your husband has been gone, and you don't know where, for years,

Suddenly you burst into tears; There is simply nothing else to do.

And I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron:

This is an ancient gesture, authentic, antique, In the very best tradition, classic, Greek;

Ulysses did this too.

But only as a gesture,—a gesture which implied To the assembled throng that he was much too moved to speak,

He learned it from Penelope...

Penelope, who really cried.

***

THE DUNCE

—Jacques Prevert He says no with his head

but he says yes with his heart he says yes to what he loves

he says no to the teacher

he stands he is questioned

and all the problems are posed

sudden mad laughter seizes him

and he erases all the words and figures names and dates

sentences and snares and despite the teacher’s threats

to the jeers of infant prodigies

with chalk of every color on the blackboard of misfortune

he draws the face of happiness.

***

DEPRESSED BY A BOOK OF BAD POETRY, I WALK TOWARD AN UNUSED PASTURE

AND INVITE THE INSECTS TO JOIN ME

25

—James Wright

Relieved, I let the book fall behind a stone. I climb a slight rise of grass.

I do not want to disturb the ants Who are walking single file up the fence post, Carrying small white petals,

Casting shadows so frail that I can see through them. I close my eyes for a moment, and listen.

The old grasshoppers

Are tired, they leap heavily now, Their thighs are burdened.

I want to hear them, they have clear sounds to make.

Then lovely, far off, a dark cricket begins

In the maple trees.

***

THE SPIDER AND THE GHOST OF THE FLY

—Vachel Lindsay

Once I loved a spider When I was born a fly,

A velvet-footed spider

With a gown of rainbow-dye. She ate my wings and gloated.

She bound me with a hair. She drove me to her parlor Above her winding stair.

To educate young spiders She took me all apart.

My ghost came back to haunt her.

I saw her eat my heart.

Doom is Like the Handle of a Pot

*** HA HA HA HA HA, HA HA

—Charles Bukowski

monkey feet

small and blue walking toward you

as the back of a building falls off

and an airplane chews the white sky,

doom is like the handle of a pot, it's there,

know it,

have ice in your tea, marry,

have children, visit your

26

dentist,

do not scream at night

even if you feel like screaming, count ten

make love to your wife or if your wife isn't there if there isn't anybody there

count 20, get up and walk to the kitchen

if you have a kitchen

and sit there sweating at 3 a.m. in the morning

monkey feet

small and blue

walking toward you.

***

THE KISS

—Anne Sexton

My mouth blooms like a cut. I've been wronged all year, tedious

nights, nothing but rough elbows in them

and delicate boxes of Kleenex calling crybaby crybaby, you fool!

Before today my body was useless. Now it's tearing at its square corners.

It's tearing old Mary's garments off, knot by knot and see—Now it's shot full of these electric bolts.

Zing! A resurrection!

Once it was a boat, quite wooden

and with no business, no salt water under it

and in need of some paint. It was no more

than a group of boards. But you hoisted her, rigged her. She's been elected.

My nerves are turned on. I hear them like musical instruments. Where there was silence

the drums, the strings are incurable playing. You did this.

Pure genius at work. Darling, the composer has stepped into fire.

***

THE NUDE SWIM

—Anne Sexton

On the southwest side of Capri

we found a little unknown grotto

27

where no people were and we

entered it completely

and let our bodies lose all their loneliness.

All the fish in us had escaped for a minute.

The real fish did not mind. We did not disturb their personal life.

We calmly trailed over them

and under them, shedding air bubbles, little white

balloons that drifted up

into the sun by the boat

where the Italian boatman slept with his hat over his face.

Water so clear you could read a book through it.

Water so buoyant you could

float on your elbow.

I lay on it as on a divan. I lay on it just like

Matisse's Red Odalisque.

Water was my strange flower. One must picture a woman

without a toga or a scarf on a couch as deep as a tomb.

The walls of that grotto were everycolor blue and

you said, "Look! Your eyes

are seacolor. Look! Your eyes are skycolor." And my eyes

shut down as if they were

suddenly ashamed.

***

US —Anne Sexton

I was wrapped in black fur and white fur and

you undid me and then

you placed me in gold light

and then you crowned me, while snow fell outside

the door in diagonal darts.

While a ten-inch snow came down like stars

in small calcium fragments,

28

we were in our own bodies

(that room that will bury us)

and you were in my body (that room that will outlive us)

and at first I rubbed your feet dry with a towel because I was your slave

and then you called me princess. Princess!

Oh then I stood up in my gold skin

and I beat down the psalms

and I beat down the clothes

and you undid the bridle and you undid the reins

and I undid the buttons,

the bones, the confusions, the New England postcards,

the January ten o'clock night,

and we rose up like wheat,

acre after acre of gold, and we harvested,

we harvested.

***

LIVING

—Denise Levertov

The fire in leaf and grass

so green it seems each summer the last summer.

The wind blowing, the leaves

shivering in the sun, each day the last day.

A red salamander so cold and so

easy to catch, dreamily

moves his delicate feet

and long tail. I hold

my hand open for him to go.

Each minute the last minute.

***

A REWARD

29

—Denise Levertov

Tired and hungry, late in the day, impelled to leave the house and search for what

might lift me back to what I had fallen away from, I stood by the shore waiting. I had walked in the silent woods:

the trees withdrew into their secrets. Dusk was smoothing breadths of silk

over the lake, watery amethyst fading to gray.

Ducks were clustered in sleeping companies afloat on their element as I was not

on mine. I turned homeward, unsatisfied.

But after a few steps, I paused, impelled again

to linger, to look North before nightfall—the expanse of calm, of calming water, last wafts

of rose in the few high clouds.

And was rewarded: the heron, unseen for weeks, came flying

widewinged toward me, settled

just offshore on his post,

took up his vigil. If you ask

why this cleared a fog from my spirit,

I have no answer.

***

MADAM AND HER MADAM —Langston Hughes

I worked for a woman, She wasn't mean—

But she had a twelve-room

House to clean.

Had to get breakfast, Dinner, and supper, too—

Then take care of her children When I got through.

Wash, iron, and scrub, Walk the dog around—

It was too much,

Nearly broke me down.

I said, Madam,

Can it be

You trying to make a Pack-horse out of me?

30

She opened her mouth.

She cried, Oh, no!

You know, Alberta, I love you so!

I said, Madam, That may be true—

But I'll be dogged If I love you!

***

I, TOO

—Langston Hughes

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen

When company comes,

But I laugh,

And eat well, And grow strong.

Tomorrow, I'll be at the table

When company comes. Nobody'll dare Say to me,

"Eat in the kitchen," Then.

Besides, They'll see how beautiful I am

And be ashamed—

I, too, am America. ***

DADDY SAYS HE TEACHES

—Judy Halebsky

Daddy says he teaches people about people

but that’s not really the word

I want to know the word so when people ask me what he does

I can tell them

He won’t tell me because I don’t know

he thinks I won’t understand

31

but I just want to know the word

so I can tell other people

like passing along a note I won’t read or a cup of water I won’t spill

***

REMINDERS AT THE READINGS —Ann Menebroker, Sacramento

Never use words you don't understand or can't pronounce. Don't steal

lines because there's always someone

who remembers, intimately, who

wrote it. Don't mumble your poem into the microphone, or look down

at your feet, that were never capable

of writing a sonnet or even free verse. Look out at your audience

as if it was your lover, and feel

the passion flying from you

to them. Why is everything finally reduced to sex? Because

it causes life and response. Would

you come to hear me read if I said I was going to yodel

Beethoven's Fifth while I picked my teeth and ate cold cereal? Well, probably. It's too crazy to

miss. I'd come, too.

***

APPRECIATING GRAPES

—William S. Gainer, Grass Valley

One by one— she ate the grapes from the center of the bunch,

until finally it looked like a cartoon sketch

of a discarded

fish carcass.

I ate the head,

then the tail

and hid the bones from the cat

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

—e.e. cummings

32

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere i go you go, my dear;and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling) i fear no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true) and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide) and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

***

HAT ONE

—Charles Bukowski

your child has no name

your hair has no color your face has no flesh your feet have no toes

your country has ten flags

your voice has no tongue

your ideas slide like snakes your eyes do not match

you eat bouquets of flowers

throw poisoned meat to the dogs I see you linger in alleys with a club

I see you with a knife for anybody I see you peddling a fishhead for a heart

and when the sun comes churning down you'll come walking in from the kitchen

with a drink in your hand

humming the latest tune

and smiling at me in your red tight dress extraordinary...

***

HEN

33

—Zbigniew Herbert

The hen is the best example of what living constantly with humans leads to. She has completely lost the lightness and grace of a bird.

Her tail sticks up over her protruding rump like a too large hat in bad taste. Her rare moments of ecstasy, when she stands on one leg and glues up her round eyes with filmy eyelids, are stunningly dis-

gusting. And in addition, that parody of song, throat-slashed sup- plications over a thing unutterably comic: a round, white, maculated

egg.

The hen brings to mind certain poets.

(translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott)

***

OUR FEAR

—Zbigniew Herbert

Our fear

does not wear a night shirt

does not have owl's eyes does not lift a casket lid

does not extinguish a candle

does not have a dead man's face either

our fear is a scrap of paper

found in a pocket "Warn Wojcik

the place on Dluga Street is hot"

our fear

does not rise on the wings of the tempest

does not sit on a church tower

it is down-to-earth it has the shape

of a bundle made in haste with warm clothing

provisions

and arms

our fear

does not have the face of a dead man

the dead are gentle to us we carry them on our shoulders

sleep under the same blanket

close their eyes

adjust their lips

34

pick a dry spot

and bury them

not too deep

not too shallow (translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott)

***

REMEMBERING MY FATHER

—Zbigniew Herbert

His face severe in clouds above the waters of childhood so rarely did he hold my warm head in his hands

given to belief not forgiving faults

because he cleared out woods and straightened paths

he carried the lantern high when we entered the night

I thought I would sit at his right hand and we would separate light from darkness

and judge those of us who live

—it happened otherwise

a junk-dealer carried his throne on a hand-cart and the deed of ownership the map of our kingdom

he was born for a second time slight very fragile with transparent skin hardly perceptible cartilage

he diminished his body so I might receive it

in an unimportant place there is shadow under a stone

he himself grows in me we eat our defeats

we burst out laughing when they say how little is needed to be reconciled

(Translated from the Polish by John Carpenter and Bogdana Carpenter)

***

PLAYING WITH MY FOUR-YEAR-OLD FRIEND

—Joyce Koff, Los Angeles

Chris and I play

and I become four

and he says "never ever" to eveything

and I repeat "never ever"

35

"stop copying me" he says

"never ever"

and the game continues he kicks his foot up in the air

like a karate champ and looks in the mirror to see his tough image

he's ready to control the world with his small fists

and scare the dark monsters

and scare me when he talks about them his eyes get big

and his voice gets loud

and I keep repeating "never ever"

to his "never ever" and he continues "stop copying me"

and then it's time to leave

and with a voice smooth and soft as a baby's

he says pointing to my husband

"are you going to kiss him when you get home"

***

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,

I have forgotten, and what arms have lain Under my head till morning; but the rain Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh

Upon the glass and listen for reply, And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain

For unremembered lads that not again

Will turn to me at midnight with a cry. Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,

Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,

Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:

I cannot say what loves have come and gone, I only know that summer sang in me A little while, that in me sings no more.

—Edna St. Vincent Millay

***

THE DREAM

—Linda Boyden, Redding

Upon my finger

The diamond ring disintegrated:

Each separate stone released itself From the band willingly,

Nothing violent.

36

More an act of erosion than

Something geothermal.

Each spilling into a void, Floating on singular journeys;

Miniature stars, but still within my reach. I stretched.

The diamonds settled On slender fingerpads.

The hem of my dress sashayed

In a whirl As I clenched my fist and I awoke:

To the memory of your tongue

Inside my mouth; The intoxicating twinge,

Bittersweet.

I surrendered back to sleep, Relaxed my grip,

Dimly aware of diamonds

Cascading freely,

Like river tears over roc

***

WITH A GREEN SCARF

—Marin Sorescu With a green scarf I blindfolded

the eyes of the trees and asked them to catch me.

At once the trees caught me, their leaves shaking with laughter.

I blindfolded the birds

with a scarf of clouds and asked them to catch me.

The birds caught me with a song.

Then with a smile I blindfolded my sorrow

and the day after it caught me

with a love.

I blindfolded the sun

with my nights

and asked the sun to catch me.

I know where you are, the sun said,

37

just behind that time.

Don't bother to hide any longer.

Don't bother to hide any longer,

said all of them, as well as all the feelings I tried to blindfold.

(translated from the Romanian by Michael Hamburger)

***

PRECAUTIONS

—Marin Sorescu

I pulled on a suit of mail

made of pebbles

worn smooth by water.

I balanced a pair of glasses

on my neck

so as to keep an eye on whatever

was coming behind me.

I gloved and greaved

my hands, my legs, my thoughts, leaving no part of my person exposed to touch

or other poisons.

Then I fashioned a breastplace

from the shell of an eight-hundred-year-old

turtle.

And when everything was just so I tenderly replied: —I love you too.

(translated from the Romanian by Paul Muldoon and Joana Russell-Gebbett)

***

FRESCO

—Marin Sorescu

In hell, maximum use

Is made of the sinners.

With the help of tweezers,

Brooches and bracelets, hairpins and rings,

38

Linen and bedclothes

Are extracted from the heads of the women.

Who are subsequently thrown Into boiling cauldrons

To keep an eye on the pitch, And see that it doesn't boil over.

Then some of them Are transformed into dinner pails

In which hot sins are carried to the domiciles

Of pensioned-off devils.

The men are employed

For the heaviest work,

Except for the hairiest of them, Who are spun afresh

And made into mats.

(translated from the Romanian by D.J. Enright and Joana Russell-Gebbett)

***

THE TEAR —Marin Sorescu

I weep and weep a tear Which will not fall

No matter how much I weep. Its pang in me

Is like the birth of an icicle.

Colder and colder, the earth

Curves on my eyelid, The northern ice-cap keeps rising.

O, my arctic eyelid.

(translated from the Romanian by Seamus Heaney and Joana Russell-Gebbett)

***

THE PLEASURES OF THE DOOR —Francis Ponge

Kings do not touch doors.

They know nothing of this pleasure: pushing before one gently or brusquely one

of those large familiar panels, then turning back to replace it—holding a door in

one's arms.

39

...The pleasure of grabbing the midriff of one of these tall obstacles to a room by

its porcelain node; that short clinch during which movement stops, the eye

widens, and the whole body adjusts to its new surrounding.

With a friendly hand one still holds on to it, before closing it decisively and shutting oneself in—which the click of the tight but well-oiled spring pleasantly confirms.

***

THE FROG —Francis Ponge

When little matchsticks of rain bounce off drenched fields, an amphibian dwarf, a

maimed Ophelia, barely the size of a fist, sometimes hops under the poet's feet and flings herself into the next pond.

Let the nervous little thing run away. She has lovely legs. Her whole body is sheathed in waterproof skin. Hardly meat, her long muscles have an elegance

neither fish nor fowl. But to escape one's fingers, the virtue of fluidity joins

forces with her struggle for life. Goitrous, she starts panting... And that

pounding heart, those wrinkled eyelids, that drooping mouth, move me to let her go

***

BEASTS BOUNDING THROUGH TIME— —Charles Bukowski

Van Gogh writing his brother for paints Hemingway testing his shotgun

Celine going broke as a doctor of medicine

the impossibility of being human Villon expelled from Paris for being a thief

Faulkner drunk in the gutters of his town

the impossibility of being human

Burroughs killing his wife with a gun Mailer stabbing his the impossibility of being human

Maupassant going mad in a rowboat Dostoevsky lined up against a wall to be shot

Crane off the back of a boat into the propeller

the impossibility Sylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato

Harry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun

Lorca murdered in the road by the Spanish troops

the impossibility Artaud sitting on a madhouse bench

Chatterton drinking rat poison

Shakespeare a plagiarist Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness

the impossibility the impossibility

40

Nietzsche gone totally mad

the impossibility of being human

all too human this breathing

in and out out and in these punks

these cowards these champions

these mad dogs of glory

moving this little bit of light toward us

impossibly.

***

FAWN'S FOSTER MOTHER

—Robinson Jeffers

The old woman sits on a bench before the door and quarrels

With her meager pale demoralized daughter.

Once when I passed I found her alone, laughing in the sun

And saying that when she was first married She lived in the old farmhouse up Garapatas Canyon.

(It is empty now, the roof has fallen

But the log walls hang on the stone foundation; the redwoods Have all been cut down, the oaks are standing;

The place is now more solitary than ever before.) "When I was nursing my second baby My husband found a day-old fawn hid in a fern-brake

And brought it; I put its mouth to the breast Rather than let it starve, I had milk enough for three babies.

Hey, how it sucked, the little nuzzler,

Digging its little hoofs like quills into my stomach. I had more joy from that than from the others."

Her face is deformed with age, furrowed like a bad road

With market-wagons, mean cares and decay.

She is grown up to the surface of things, a cell of dry skin Soon to be shed from the earth's old eyebrows, I see that once in her spring she lived in the streaming arteries,

The stir of the world, the music of the mountain.

***

Sleepy

3:16 AND ONE HALF...

—Charles Bukowski

here I'm supposed to be a great poet

and I'm sleepy in the afternoon here I am aware of death like a giant bull

charging at me

41

and I'm sleepy in the afternoon

here I'm aware of wars and men fighting in the ring

and I'm aware of good food and wine and good women and I'm sleepy in the afternoon

I'm aware of a woman's love and I'm sleepy in the afternoon, I lean into the sunlight behind a yellow curtain

I wonder where the summer flies have gone I remember the most bloody death of Hemingway

and I'm sleepy in the afternoon.

some day I won't be sleepy in the afternoon

some day I'll write a poem that will bring volcanoes

to the hills out there

but right now I'm sleepy in the afternoon and somebody asks me, "Bukowski, what time is it?"

and I say, "3:16 and a half."

I feel very guilty, I feel obnoxious, useless, demented, I feel

sleepy in the afternoon,

they are bombing churches, o.k., that's o.k.,

the children ride ponies in the park, o.k., that's o.k., the libraries are filled with thousands of books of knowledge,

great music sits inside the nearby radio

and I am sleepy in the afternoon, I have this tomb within myself that says,

ah, let the others do it, let them win, let me sleep, wisdom is in the dark

sweeping through the dark like brooms, I'm going where the summer flies have gone,

try to catch me.

***

FUGITIVE FROM MEDUSA'S HAIRNET

—D. Jayhne Edwards, Santa Rosa there's

a snake

in-my

watery wash

basin

no eyes no mouth

no fangs

no tail

he?

42

she?

it?

often appears

after-I comb my hair

writhing

slithering

his? her?

its?

way

downward toward the drain:

One human hair

***

THE HOUSE WAS QUIET AND THE WORLD WAS CALM —Wallace Stevens

The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book. The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,

Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be

The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought. The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind: The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world, In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself

Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

***

BIG ISLAND ROMANTIC

—Todd Cirillo, Grass Valley

43

Lovers

in the dark hiding behind

seawalls loving in the moonlight

slowly caressing

tender

soft parts hoping

their tide

will finally

come in.

***

MINIATURE

—Yannis Ritsos

The woman stood up in front of the table. Her sad hands begin to cut thin slices of lemon for tea

like yellow wheels for a very small carriage

made for a child's fairy tale. The young officer sitting opposite is buried in the old armchair. He doesn't look at her.

He lights up his cigarette. His hand holding the match trembles, throwing light on his tender chin and the teacup's handle. The clock holds its heartbeat for a moment. Something has been postponed.

The moment has gone. It's too late now. Let's drink our tea. Is it possible, then, for death to come in that kind of carriage?

To pass by and go away? And only this carriage to remain,

with its little yellow wheels of lemon parked for so many years on a side street with unlit lamps,

and then a small song, a little mist, and then nothing?

*** NO HELP FOR THAT

—Charles Bukowski

there is a place in the heart that

will never be filled

a space

and even during the best moments

and

the greatest times

we will know it

44

we will know it

more than ever

there is a place in the heart that will never be filled

and

we will wait and

wait

in that space.

***

AT THE ZOO, A.D. 2184

—Taylor Graham, Somerset

A child points, What’s that? It’s a bird,

the father says. A Robin. It can fly, but

it has to flap its wings. I remember a poem in school about Who Killed

Cock Robin, and just look, here he is. I move on, passing the Endangered Species

Wall, and the Extinct. Hawk and Warbler from a century ago. Porpoise and Whale

that slipped away. Orangutan, Antelope,

Shark and Otter, Bullfrog, Horse and Bear.

At the mammal cages, a Domestic Cat

in ancient Pharaoh profile gazes down

at me, indifferent as a household tabby on a window-sill, if this were 1984. But in these modern days, who keeps cats?

And here’s the Dog, a brownish mutt

heir to hundreds of dead breeds. He drops

his bone and comes to the fence as if to beg, like that old picture of a puppy

at the Pound. Oh please oh take me home.

***

MY MOTHER ONCE TOLD ME

—Yehuda Amichai

My mother once told me

45

Not to sleep with flowers in the room.

Since then I have not slept with flowers.

I sleep alone, without them.

There were many flowers. But I’ve never had enough time. And persons I love are already pushing themselves

Away from my life, like boats Away from the shore.

My mother said Not to sleep with flowers.

You won’t sleep.

You won’t sleep, mother of my childhood.

The bannister I clung to

When they dragged me off to school

Is long since burnt. But my hands, clinging,

Remain

Clinging.

(Translated by Assia Gutmann)

***

ASPEN TREE —Paul Celan

Aspen tree your leaves glance white into the dark. My mother’s hair was never white.

Dandelion, so green is the Ukraine. My yellow-haired mother did not come home.

Rain cloud, above the well do you hover

My quiet mother weeps for everyone. Round star, you wind the golden loop.

My mother’s heart was ripped by lead.

Oaken door, who lifted you off your hinges?

My gentle mother cannot return.

(Translated by Michael Hamburger)

***

YOUR MOTHER SINGS

—Michael Hettich

Your mother sings

46

an old song as she

hangs the wash. She looks around—

And when she is sure

no one is watching (but you are watching) she lets the pigeons

she keeps at the bottom of her laundry basket fly free—

Each has a note

in its beak. And now a pigeon

flies in your window, dies at your feet.

The note says: I live alone, please

come, please help me. But she doesn’t live

alone, your mother

is downstairs now

moving pots and pans, starting

dinner, singing

a song she sang,

you imagine, when you couldn’t sleep.

You hear her down there singing. You see the pigeon on the floor.

***

My Eyes Have Pages Like a Book"

CHANGES

—James Lee Jobe, Davis

1

Look at the skeleton people that my toes have become! Perhaps they have lives of their own! When the master

pulls the strings they rattle their bones at him.

It is all in a day's work. A World War One vet said to me,

"You'll know you're old when the whole rest of the world

seems like idiots." "Some people are born old," I told him.

2

My fingers have been replaced by ploughshares, beaten

47

from someone else's sword. Each digit lives it's own dream,

so my hands are like movie theaters! A matinee is starting soon,

and anyway, the real money is in the snack bar. I hold my fingers

up in the bathroom light, lightening bolts shoot from the tips,

and I remember, for once, to put the seat down for my wife.

3

Dreams and memories seem more and more alike,

and in those moments when I am neither asleep

or awake it is hard to tell the difference between the two.

What I did, what I remember, what I dream—it is all the same now.

Why compare? My nose is a hound dog, here to sniff it all out! My ears

are also dogs, and they stare at the gate, waiting for the master to return.

4

If ever I was innocent, I can't remember it. It seems like I've always

been behind my place in the race, but with a good reason that

I just can't explain. My eyes have pages like a book, and written

on these pages is a story that you really don't need to know.

Please be careful not to lose my place!

Each page is the weight of a submarine.

5

The sun is setting, but it is winter, really it is still quite early.

Don't be fooled by darkness! Dinner will be ready soon,

and all of the family will sit together in a circle. My hair

is green lichen that covers all, like on the boulders

48

of the Yuba River. Every meal, every year,

every day, I pull them all closer and closer

*** CHARACTER

—Taslima Nasrin

You're a girl

and you'd better not forget that when you step over the threshold of your house

men will look askance at you.

When you keep on walking down the land

men will follow you and whistle. When you cross the land and step onto the main road

men will revile you and call you a loose woman.

If you've got no character you'll turn back

and if not

you'll keep on going

as you're going now.

***

BORDER

—Taslima Nasrin I'm going to move ahead.

Behind me my whole family is calling, my child is pulling at my sari-end,

my husband stands blocking the door,

but I will go. There's nothing ahead but a river

I will cross.

I know how to swim but they

won't let me swim, won't let me cross. There's nothing on the other side of the river

but a vast expanse of fields. But I'll touch this emptiness once

and run against the wind, whose whooshing sound

makes me want to dance. I'll dance someday and then return.

I've not played keep-away for years

as I did in childhood. I'll raise a great commotion playing keep-away someday

and then return.

For years I have't cried with my head

in the lap of solitude.

49

I'll cry to my heart's content someday

and then return.

There's nothing ahead but a river

and I know how to swim. Why shouldn't I go? I'll go.

(Both poems were translated from the Bengali by Carolyne Wright and Farida Sarkar)

***

THE WASHERWOMAN

—Veronica Volkow, Mexico

She feels her hands, scabrous as fish,

blind fish striking against the rock,

incessantly against the rock for years and years; she watches the night pierced with eyes,

humid, slippery glances,

the mute faces shifting, disappearing,

brilliant glances of girls, the dazed look of exhausted mothers.

The day ends and people return to their houses

and water runs from the faucet monotonously as a song, the water has lost the shape of pipes,

lost the memory of its mountain source and has pounded out its course, besieged by obstacles

like the feet, like the eyes, like the hands. She looks at shadows people drag along,

shadows on the walls, corners, the streets,

fugitive ink that marks the beaten roads, desperate roads, laborious,

looking for only, perhaps, a fidelity.

(Translated from the Spanish by Forrest Gander) ***

THE KEY OF WATER

—Octovio Paz, Mexico

After Rishikesh

the Ganges is still green.

The glass horizon

breaks among the peaks. We walk upon crystals.

Above and below

great gulfs of calm. In the blue spaces

white rocks, black clouds.

50

You said:

Le pays est plein de sources.

That night I dipped my hands in your breasts.

MOON, FLOWERS, MAN —Su Tung P'o

I raise my cup and invite The moon to come down from the

Sky. I hope she will accept

Me. I raise my cup and ask The branches, heavy with flowers,

To drink with me. I wish them

Long life and promise never

To pick them. In company With the moon and the flowers,

I get drunk, and none of us

Every worries about good Or bad. How many people

Can comprehend our joy? I

Have wine and moon and flowers.

Who else do I want for drinking companions?

***

YOU WILL HEAR THUNDER AND REMEMBER ME

—Anna Akhmatova You will hear thunder and remember me,

And think: she wanted storms. The rim Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson.

And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire.

That day in Moscow, it will all come true,

When, for the last time, I take my leave,

And hasten to the heights that I have longed for,

Leaving my shadow still to be with you. ***

LET ANY, WHO WILL, STILL BASK IN THE SOUTH

—Anna Akhmatova

You are with me once more, Autumn my friend!

—Annensky

Let any, who will, still bask in the south On the paradisal sand,

It's northerly here—and this year of the north

Autumn will be my friend.

I'll live, in a dream, in a stranger's house

51

Where perhaps I have died,

Where the mirrors keep something mysterious

To themselves in the evening light.

I shall walk between black fir-trees, Where the wind is at one with the heath, And a dull splinter of the moon will glint

Like an old knife with jagged teeth.

Our last, blissful unmeeting I shall bring

To sustain me here— The cold, pure, light flame of conquering

What I was destined for.

(Translated by D.M. Thomas)

***

DEATH

—Anna Akhmatova

I

I was on the edge of something

For which there is no precise name... An insistent drowsiness,

A self-evasion... 2

And I am standing on the threshold of something

That befalls everyone, but at different cost...

On this ship there is a cabin for me And wind in my sails—and the terrible moment

Of taking leave of my native land.

(Translated by Judith Hemschemeyer) ***

"EVERYTHING IS PLUNDERED..."

—Anna Akhmatova

Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,

Death's great black wing scrapes the air,

Misery gnaws to the bone.

Why then do we not despair?

By day, from the surrounding woods,

cherries blow summer into town; at night the deep transparent skies

glitter with new galaxies.

52

And the miraculous comes so close

to the ruined, dirty houses— something not known to anyone at all,

but wild in our breast for centuries. ***

OF ALL WORKS

—Bertold Brecht

Of all works I prefer

Those used and worn.

Copper vessels with dents and with flattened rims

Knives and forks whose wooden handles Many hands have grooved: such shapes

Seemed the noblest to me. So too the flagstones around

Old houses, trodden by many feet and ground down, With clumps of grass in the cracks, these too

Are happy works.

Absorbed into the use of the many Frequently changed, they improve their appearance, growing enjoyable

Because often enjoyed.

Even the remnants of broken sculptures With lopped-off hands I love. They also

Lived with me. If they were dropped at least they must have been carried. If men knocked them over they cannot have stood too high up. Buildings half dilapidated

Revert to the look of buildings not yet completed Generously designed: their fine proportions

Can already be guessed; yet they still make demands

On our understanding. At the same time They have served already, indeed have been left behind. All this

Makes me glad.

(Translated from the German by Michael Hamburger) ***

I REMEMBER WHEN

my father climbed the western mountain. Every day he chopped more

of its peak off so we could have more

daylight to grow our food in, and when he'd

chopped deep enough that in midsummer we had sun for an extra minute, which

is, of course, an exaggeration, he

knew he had done something real, and called us to watch the sun settle

in the chink and disappear.

53

Next day the sun had moved, but he dept digging

the same dent, wanting one day a year. One day, he told us, the mountain would be

chopped in two and there would be one complete day hours longer than there'd ever been.

People in the town called him "Father" too.

Some volunteered to help, but no,

it was his, his dent and his light; they were lucky

he was willing to share. At night there were new stars.

—When he hit a spring and the water gushed out a waterfall, flooding the valley, the town,

to form a beautiful lake, deep,

cold, and full of fish found nowhere else, the animals that lived

wild on his mountain rejoiced and grew

wilder, more passionate. They rejoiced!

We still do.

—Michael Hettich

***

WHAT ARE THE STARS? —James Lee Jobe

The stars are little holes in the sky

that let the light of Heaven shine through,

so that the night will be softer.

The stars are flying soldiers

protecting the world

from things far above us. The stars are maps to our souls;

once you open these maps you can never close them again.

The stars are the spirits of all our loved ones

who went before us.

***

THINGS

—Jorge Luis Borges

My cane, my pocket change, this ring of keys,

54

The obedient lock, the belated notes

The few days left to me will not find time

To read, the deck of cards, the tabletop, A book, and crushed in its pages the withered

Violet, monument to an afternoon Undoubtedly unforgettable, now forgotten, The mirror in the west where a red sunrise

Blazes its illusion. How many things, Files, doorsills, atlases, wine glasses, nails,

Serve us like slaves who never say a word,

Blind and so mysteriously reserved. They will endure beyond our vanishing;

And they will never know that we have gone.

***

RILKE AT THE ZOO

—Taylor Graham, Somerset

That afternoon in the Jardin des Plantes

the poet stood before the elephant to memorize

its slow depths and textured surfaces; and then the hippopotamus, simple as an artist’s

vision, shiny as molten metal out of water.

But it was the panther, abstracted

behind its bars—what sculptor dare steal those ligaments and muscle? A poet strips them to the word.

He stood before the creature till it stopped

its pacing, it almost forgot to breathe. As if

a poem could rob the object of its pulse, take that rhythm for itself. Who could forget

the glazed stare of those eyes

as he turned to go, after he found the rhyme?

***

THE PANTHER —Rainer Maria Rilke

In the Jardin des Plantes, Paris

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,

has grown so weary that it cannot hold

anything else. It seems to him there are a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over, the movement of his powerful soft strides

is like a ritual dance around a center

55

in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils lifts, quietly—. An image enters in,

rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles, plunges into the heart and is gone. ***

TALKING IN BED

—Philip Larkin

Talking in bed ought to be easiest,

Lying together there goes back so far,

An emblem of two people being honest.

Yet more and more time passes silently.

Outside, the wind’s incomplete unrest Builds and disperses clouds about the sky,

And dark towns heap up on the horizon.

None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why At this unique distance from isolation

It becomes still more difficult to find Words at once true and kind,

Or not untrue and not unkind. ***

BAMBOO

—Ryokan

The thick bamboo grove near my hut

Keeps me nice and cool.

Shoots proliferate, blocking the path,

While old branches reach for the sky. Years of frost give bamboo spirit; They are most mysterious when wrapped in mist.

Bamboo is as hardy as pine and oak, And more subtle than peach or plum blossoms.

It grows straight and tall,

Empty inside but with a sturdy root. I love the purity and honesty of my bamboo,

And want them to thrive here always!

***

Wild peonies

Now at their peak In glorious full bloom:

Too precious to pick,

56

Too precious not to pick.

O lonely pine! I'd gladly give you

My straw hat and Thatches coat To ward off the rain.

—Ryokan

***

How can I possibly sleep

This moonlit evening?

Come, my friends, Let's sing and dance

All night long.

Stretched out,

Tipsy,

Under the vast sky:

Splendid dreams Beneath the cherry blossoms.

Wild roses, Plucked from fields,

Full of croaking frogs: Float them in your wine And enjoy every minute!

—Ryokan

________________________

SUMMER EVENING

—Ryokan

The night advances toward dawn, Dew drips from the bamboo onto my brushwood gate. My neighbor to the west has stopped pounding his mortar;

My little hermit's garden grows moist. Frogs croak near and far,

Fireflies flit high and low.

Wide awake, it's not possible to sleep tonight. I smooth my pillow and let my thoughts drif

Spring rains,

Summer showers, A dry autumn:

May nature smile on us

And we all will share in the bounty.

Please don't mistake me

57

For a bird

When I swoop

Into your garden To eat the cherry apples.

I went there To beg rice

But the blooming bush clover Among the stones

Made me forget the reason.

WHAT ELSE

—Miroslav Holub

What else to do but drive a small dog

out of yourself

with a stick?

Scruff bristling with fright

he huddles against the wall,

crawls in the domestic zodiac, limps,

bleeding from the muzzle.

He would eat out of your hand

but that's no use. What else

is poetry but killing that small dog

in yourself?

And all around the barking, barking,

the hysterical barking

of cats.’

THE FOREST —Miroslav Holub

Among the primary rocks

where the bird spirits

crack the granite seeds and the tree statues

with their black arms

threaten the clouds,

suddenly

there comes a rumble,

as if history were being uprooted,

58

the grass bristles,

boulders tremble,

the earth's surface cracks

and there grows a mushroom,

immense as life litself,

filled with billions of cells

immense as life itself, eternal,

watery,

appearing in this world for the first

and last time.

________________________

BEHIND THE HOUSE

—Miroslav Holub

Behind the house is a leaky saucepan of destinies.

A scooter grown wise with age. On a clothesline a wisp of stale breath.

Nitrogen oxide. A drop of blood.

And in the shed in a heap rags, ropes, rumpuses

and angels.

PAINTED WINDOWS

—Gloria Fuertes

I lived in a house with two real windows and the other two painted on: Those painted windows caused my first sorrow.

I'd touch the sides of the hall trying to reach the windows from inside.

I spent my whole childhood wanting

to lean out and see what could be seen from the windows that weren't there.

MIRRORS

—Jane Blue, Sacramento

The mirror in my childhood bedroom

tucked in a corner. The mirror of the Haunted House ride at Disneyland,

someone you didn’t expect

59

grimacing by your shoulder.

The mirror of my history.

Why should I live elsewhere? You write and discover. The mirror

of discovery. Once in the town of Willows I saw the mirror of blooming almond orchards. Foothills in summer, baked brown, the absorbent

shimmer of insignificant plants. The Scarlet Pimpernel.

When I first learned its name, that tiny weed

astonished me. I’d seen the movie, but the plant was nothing! No hero. To me

even the invading star thistle is beautiful—

heathery purple oldgrowth

like a dry sea in the hills. A dry snow that occurs only in California.

It’s cold again, an arctic wind blowing down.

The months mean little to me any more. They are mirrors of other months.

Honeybees have survived an epidemic

of parasites. That means I can grow zucchini

if this rain ever stops.

THE CALM OF A MIRROR —Jeanine Stevens, Sacramento

so often deceives. It frightens to know

my image is smaller

than what I see. Two black specs,

minute spiders

float at the edge

of each iris, chipped imperfections eating

their way out—

growing larger with time. This flaw, hardly

noticed in summer,

by winter screams “don’t wear black,”

it reveals creases.

By evening, old

Sycamores cast round shapes on soft lamps,

furrows disappear

behind walls, firelight neutralizes

smoke etched mirrors, and hairline cracks recede

into bone white china.

60

SUZHOU: THE CITY OF SILK

—Don Feliz, Sacramento Marco Polo called it The Venice of Asia.

Some canals are now paved streets,

others teem with tourist boats.

Children wave at us from balconies—

women on stone steps will wash

clothes in the gray-green water

where boatmen once embarked taking

fine silks to the Emperor in Beijing.

EVERYTHING CHANGES

—Bertolt Brecht

Everything changes. You can make

A fresh start with your final breath.

But what has happened has happened. And the water

You once poured into the wine cannot be Drained off again.

What has happened has happened. The water You once poured into the wine cannot be

Drained off again, but

Everything changes. You can make A fresh start with your final breath.

________________________

WHO MAKES THESE CHANGES?

—Rumi

Who makes these changes?

I shoot an arrow right. It lands left. I ride after a deer and find myself

chased by a hog. I plot to get what I want

and end up in prison.

I dig pits to trap others

and fall in. I should be suspicious

of what I want.

I AM A BOOK I NEITHER WROTE NOR READ

61

—Delmore Schwartz

I am a book I neither wrote nor read, A comic, tragic play in which new masquerades

Astonishing as guns crackle like raids Newly each time, whatever one is prepared To come upon, suddenly dismayed and afraid,

As in the dreams which make the fear of sleep The terror of love, the depth one cannot leap.

How the false truths of the years of youth have passed! Have passed at full speed like trains which never stopped

There where I stood and waited, hardly aware,

How little I knew, or which of them was the one

To mount and ride to hope or where true hope arrives.

I no more wrote than read that book which is

The self I am, half-hidden as it is From one and all who see within a kiss

The lounging formless blackness of an abyss.

How could I think the brief years were enough To prove the reality of endless love?

The Endless Patience of the Light

LONG AFTERNOONS —Adam Zagajewski

Those were the long afternoons when poetry left me. The river flowed patiently, nudging lazy boats to sea.

Long afternoons, the coast of ivory.

Shadows lounged in the streets, haughty manikins in shopfronts stared at me with bold and hostile eyes.

Professors left their schools with vacant faces,

as if the Iliad had finally done them in. Evening papers brought disturbing news, but nothing happened, no one hurried.

There was no one in the windows, you weren't there; even nuns seemed ashamed of their lives.

Those were the long afternoons when poetry vanished and I was left with the city's opaque demon,

like a poor traveler stranded outside the Gare du Nord

with his bulging suitcase wrapped in twine

and September's black rain falling.

Oh, tell me how to cure myself of irony, the gaze

that sees but doesn't penetrate; tell me how to cure myself of silence.

62

SONG OF THE BARREN ORANGE TREE

—Federico Garcia Lorca

Woodcutter.

Cut my shadow from me. Free me from the torment of seeing myself without fruit.

Why was I born among mirrors?

The day walks in circles around me,

and the night copies me in all its stars.

I want to live without seeing myself.

And I will dream that ants and thistleburrs are my

leaves and my birds.

Woodcutter.

Cut my shadow from me.

Free me from the torment

of seeing myself without fruit.

(trans. by W.S. Merwin)

BIRDS, AT RANDOM —Jacques Prevert

I learned very late to love birds I regret it a little

but now it's all arranged

we understand each other they don't occupy themselves with me

I don't occupy myself with them

I look at them

I leave them alone all the birds do their best they set an example

not the example as for example Mister Glacis who remarkably courageously conducted himself

during the war or the example of little Paul

who was so poor and so handsome and so very honest and who later became the great Paul so rich

so old so honorable and so repulsive and so

avaricous and so charitable and so pious

or for example that old servant who had an exemplary life and death never any arguments

not that with her nail tapping a tooth not that

no arguments with Mr. or Mrs. on the subject of that frightful question of salaries

no

63

birds set an example

a proper example

the example of birds the example of the feathers the wings the flight of birds

the example of the nests the voyages and the songs of birds the example of the beauty of birds the example of the heart of birds

the light of birds.

________________________

AT THE FLORIST'S

—Jacques Prevert

A man enters a florist's and chooses some flowers

the florist wraps up the flowers

the man puts his hand in his pocket to find the money

the money to pay for the flowers

but at the same time he puts

all of a sudden his hand on his heart

and he falls

At the same time that he falls

the money rolls on the floor and then the flowers fall at the same time as the man

at the same time as the money and the florist stands there

with the money rolling

with the flowers spoiling with the man dying

obviously all this is very sad

and she's got to do something

the florist but she doesn't know quite where to start she doesn't know

at which end to begin

There's so many things to do

with this man dying with these flowers spoiling

and this money

this money that rolls

that doesn't stop rolling.

_

Sleep is like a bridge

which reaches from today to tomorrow.

64

Below, like a dream,

the water flows by.

—Juan Ramon Jimenez

THE SECRET

—Denise Levertov

Two girls discover

the secret of life in a sudden line of

poetry.

I who don't know the secret wrote

the line. They

told me

(through a third person)

they had found it

but not what it was not even

what line it was. No doubt by now, more than a week

later, they have forgotten the secret,

the line, the name of the poem. I love them

for finding what

I can't find,

and for loving me

for the line I wrote,

and for forgetting it so that

a thousand times, till death finds them, they may

discover it again, in other

lines

in other

happenings. And for

wanting to know it, for

assuming there is such a secret, yes,

for that

65

most of all.

SINCE NINE O'CLOCK— —C.P. Cavafy

Half past twelve. The time has passed quickly since nine o'clock when I lit the lamp,

and sat down here. I sat without reading,

and without speaking. With whom could I speak all alone in this house.

Since nine o'clock when I lit the lamp,

the vision of my youthful body has appeared and found me and reminded me

of closed heavily scented rooms, and pleasure long past—what audacious pleasure! And it also brought before my eyes

streets that have now become unrecognizable, centers full of movement that are ended,

and theaters and cafes that once used to be.

The vision of my youthful body

appeared and brought me also the sad memories; family mournings, separations,

feelings of my dear ones, feelings of the dead so little esteemed.

Half past twelve. How the time has passed. Half past twelve. How the years have passed

AND I RECLINED AND LAY DOWN ON THEIR BEDS —C.P. Cavafy

When I entered the house of pleasure,

I did not remain in the room where they celebrate recognized loves with some semblance of order.

I went into the hidden rooms and I reclined and lay down on their beds.

I went into the hidden rooms that they are even ashamed to name.

But not shameful to me—for then

what kind of poet or craftsman would I be?

I'd rather lead a hermit's life. It would be more consonant, much more consonant with my poetry;

than for me to enjoy myself in the commonplace room.

_______________________

HALF AN HOUR

—C.P. Cavafy

66

I neither had you, nor will I ever have you,

I guess. A few words, a coming close as in the bar the other day, and nothing more.

It is a pity, I do not deny. But we of the world of Art sometimes create pleasure with intensity of mind, and of course only for a short while,

which almost gives the effect of the real. So in the bar the other day—the merciful

alcohol also helping much—

I had a perfect erotic half-hour. And it seems to me you understood,

and you purposely stayed somewhat longer.

That was very necessary. Because

for all of imagination and the magic alcohol, I needed to see your lips too,

I needed to have your body close to me.

________________________

THE BANDAGED SHOULDER

—C.P. Cavafy

He said that he had hurt himself on a wall or that he had fallen.

But there was probably another reason for the wounded, bandaged shoulder.

With a somewhat forceful movement, to bring down from a shelf some

photographs that he wanted to see at close range, the bandage was loosened and a little blood ran.

I bandaged the shoulder again, and tying it I was somewhat slow; because it did not hurt,

and I liked to look at the blood.

That blood was part of my love.

After he left I found a blood-drenched rag in front of the chair, from the bandages,

a rag headed for the garbage; which I brought up to my lips,

and which I held there for a long time—

the blood of love on my lips.

FOR A FIVE-YEAR-OLD —Fleur Adcock

A snail is climbing up the window-sill Into your room, after a night of rain.

You call me in to see, and I explain That it would be unkind to leave it there:

It might crawl to the floor; we must take care

67

That no one squashes it. You understand,

And carry it outside, with careful hand,

To eat a daffodil.

I see, then, that a kind of faith prevails: Your gentleness is moulded still by words From me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds,

From me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed Your closest relatives, and who purveyed

The harshest kind of truth to many another.

But that is how things are: I am your mother, And we are kind to snails

SLEEP

—Russell Edson

There was a man who didn't know how to sleep, nodding off every night into a

drab, unprofessional sleep. Sleep that he had grown so tired of sleeping.

He tried reading The Manual of Sleep, but it just put him to sleep. That same old

sleep that he had grown so tired of sleeping...

He needed a sleeping master, who with a whip and a chair could discipline the

night, and make him jump through hoops of gasolined fire. Someone who could make a tiger sit on a tiny pedestal and yawn.

THE TORMENTED MIRROR —Russell Edson

Let me gaze into your lovely eyes, said a man to a mirror.

The mirror said nothing, but gazed back into the man's lovely eyes.

His mother said, stop tormenting the mirror.

I'm gazing into its lovely eyes, said the man. Those are your lovely eyes, said the mother, which are not so lovely, as they are

more like spyglasses than eyes.

His father said, what lovely thing are you doing to the mirror?

Tormenting it, said the man as he continued to gaze into the mirror's lovely

eyes...

A LETTER FROM HOME

—Russell Edson

68

One night a man's shadow died. Slumping, it groped its heart and dripped down

the wall into a dark stain on the floor in the shape of a man who died in his

bedroom alone...

The man writes home: Dear mom, my shadow is dead. I may have to be reborn, if you and dad are up to it, and have a new shadow attached...

His mother writes back: Dear Ken, please don't count on it. In truth, dear, given another chance I think I would ask for an abortion...

SADNESS —Shuntara Tanikawa

Sadness

A half-peeled apple Not a metaphor

Not a poem

Merely there A half-peeled apple

Sadness

Merely there

Yesterday's evening paper Merely there

Merely there

A warm breast Merely there

Nightfall Sadness Apart from words

Apart from the heart Merely here

The things of today.

STONE AND LIGHT

—Shuntaro Tanikawa

The stone doesn't repel the light, The stone doesn't absorb the light. On the stone sits a deerfly,

The light is radiant in its downy hair.

The light just now arrived on earth.

_______________________

CONCERNING A GIRL

—Shuntaro Tanikawa

from a little basket on the kitchen shelf I was about to

pick a star the girl insisted she didn't care about a harvest I thought I had planted a seed but perhaps we too

had been planted seeds without realizing it we were raised

69

and ripened and will probably wither away later we're nothing

more than a tiny clod of earth in the middle of the world's

garden yet this time we are the ones that will raise someone will stand on us and grope for a star with a huge hand perhaps

even check for ripeness however we are not fertilizer for stars even at that time a girl wise beyond doubt will be there to plant her naked feet within us then she herself will become

a flower and when ripe a star will naturally fall the flower knows all about this and so will not be afraid of

dying when standing on my tiptoes about to pick a star I

was called by the girl

(Today's poetry was translated from the Japanese by Harold Wright.)

THE WORLD WAS WARM AND WHITE WHEN I WAS BORN —Delmore Schwartz

The world was warm and white when I was born: Beyond the windowpane the world was white,

A glaring whiteness in a leaded frame,

Yet warm as in the hearth and heart of light.

Although the whiteness was almond and was bone In midnight's still paralysis, nevertheless

The world was warm and hope was infinite

All things would come, fulfilled, all things would be known All things would be enjoyed, fulfilled, and come to be my own.

How like a summer the years of youth have passed! —How like the summer of 1914, in all truth!—

Patience, my soul, the truth is never known Until the future has become the past

And then, only, when the love of truth at last

Becomes the truth of love, when both are one, Then, then, then, Eden becomes Utopia and is surpassed:

For then the dream of knowledge and knowledge knows

Motive and joy at once wherever it goes.

_______________________

ALL OF THE FRUITS HAD FALLEN —Delmore Schwartz

All of the fruits had fallen, The bears had fallen asleep,

And the pears were useless and soft

Like used hopes, under the starlight's

Small knowledge, scattered aloft In a glittering senseless drift:

The jackals of remorse in a cage

Drugged beyond mirth and rage.

Then, then, the dark hour flowered!

70

Under the silence, immense

And empty as far-off seas,

I wished for the innocence Of my stars and my stones and my trees

All the brutality and inner sense A dog and a bird possess, The dog who barked at the moon

As an enemy's white fang, The bird that thrashed up the bush

And soared to soar as it sang,

A being all present as touch, Free of the future and past

—Until, in the dim window glass,

The fog or cloud of my face

Showed me my fear at last!

THE SUFFERING OF SPIDERS

—Rhony Bhopla, Sacramento

They waddle into our homes

grown to black and tangly proportions delicately treading over

linoleum and the tidied carpet

creeping into little valleys Little boy cries out

kill it! kill it!

watch with decrepid pain the anguish of the spider

unharmed, yet daunted by

innocence

waiting in its path

suffering continues the spider is surveyed, legs

lame from walking instinctually

waiting for webbed insects and the

escape from the reverberating

sounds of the screeching boy

the boy shouts it, we do it

kill it! kill it!

dead is the spider, something less than what it was before

we wash our hands

71

think that the innocent cheering

was something we liked, but

didn’t quite understand until the boy becomes dull and silent.

________________________

THE MOTH —Miroslav Holub

The moth having left its pupa

in the galaxy of flour grains

and pots of rancid

drippings,

the moth

discovers in this topical darkness

that it's a kind of butterfly

but

it can't believe it, it can't believe it,

it can't believe that it's a tiny, flying, relatively

free moth and it wants to go back,

but there's no way.

Freedom makes

the moth tremble forever, that is,

twenty-two hours.

(translated from the Czech by David Young and Dana Habova) LITERARY BASH

—Miroslav Holub

Like eggs of hail

from the blue sky, the buzz of greasy bluebottles,

the twitter of eggheads.

Interior sounds of matter fatigue.

Never stopping.

But even Orpheus

72

when things got togher

and he was leading Eurydice

out of the underworld was quiet as a grave,

the only sound his crunching step on the bodies of snails

shedding indigo blood.

In those days, of course,

there were no literary bashes.

_______________________

THE RAIN AT NIGHT

—Miroslav Holub

With mouse-like teeth

the rain gnaws at stone.

The trees parade through the town

like prophets.

Perhaps it's the sobbing

of the monstrous angels of darkness, perhaps the suppressed laughter

of the flowers out there in the garden, trying to cure consumption by rustling.

Perhaps the purring

of the holy drought

under any kind of cover.

An unspeakable time,

when the voice of loudspeakers cracks

and poems are made not of words but of drops.

THE MOON CATCHER

—Richard Zimmer, Sacramento

The Story Teller settled in his chair,

lit his pipe and asked his audience

what story they would like to hear.

He then told a tale of the Chinese poet

Li Po, who was reading a poem to the moon.

He leaned over to catch its reflection, and fell into the Yellow River and drowned.

73

The Story Teller smiled, as he added—

Li Po then, was carried away on the back

of a dolphin, for a trip to join the Immortals.

IF I BECAME A STONE —So Chong-Ju

If I became a stone

stone would become lotus

lotus,

lake

and if I became

a lake

lake would become

lotus

lotus,

stone.

A SNEEZE

—So Chong-Ju Somewhere

is someone saying my words?

I stepped out into the blue autumn day's

winds that touched the ricepaper door.

I sniffed at the weather,

and sneezed. Somewhere

is someone saying my words?

Somewhere as someone says my words,

has a flower overheard and passed them along?

Traces that stir the waves of an old love.

Is someone somewhere

saying my words?

74

As someone says them

has an ox overheard? Does he pass them along?

(Translated from the Korean by David R. McKann)

The Heat of Midnight Tears

THE COFFER WITH THE POISONOUS SNAKE

—Mirabai

Rana sent a gold coffer of complicated ivory;

But inside a black and green asp was waiting,

“It is a necklace that belonged to a great Queen!” I put it around my neck; it fit well.

It became a string of lovely pearls, each with a moon inside.

My room then was full of moonlight as if the full moon Had found its way in through the open window.

_______________________

THE HEAT OF MIDNIGHT TEARS

—Mirabai

Listen, my friend, this road is the heart opening,

Kissing his feet, resistance broken, tears all night. If we could reach the Lord through immersion in water,

I would have asked to be born a fish in this life. If we could reach Him through nothing but berries and wild nuts

Then surely the saints would have been monkeys when they came from the

womb! If we could reach him by munching lettuce and dry leaves

Then the goats would surely get to the Holy One before us!

If the worship of stone statues could bring us all the way, I would have adored a granite mountain years ago.

Mirabai says: The heat of midnight tears will bring you to God.

ODE TO THE SPELL CHECKER

—Anonymous

Eye halve a spelling chequer

It came with my pea sea

It plainly marques four my revue Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.

Eye strike a key and type a word And weight four it two say

Weather eye am wrong or write

75

It shows me strait a weigh.

As soon as a mist ache is maid It nose bee fore two long

And eye can put the error rite It's rare lea ever wrong.

Eye have run this poem threw it I am shore your pleased two no

Its letter perfect awl the weigh

My chequer tolled me sew.

The old dog

is leading the way— visiting family graves

—Issa

***

Wolves are keening in harmony—

this snowy evening

—Joso

***

Hiding its tail among the ears of barley—

an old fox

—Tesshi

***

Even small birds fly past and do not enter—

so deep the woods

—Chine

***

If it had no voice

the heron might disappear— this morning's snow

—Chiyo

***

76

A thin layer of snow

coats the wings of mandarin ducks— such stillness!

—Shiki HALF-CASTE

(by John Agard) Excuse me

standing on one leg

I'm half-caste

Explain yuself

wha yu mean

when yu say half-caste yu mean when picasso

mix red an green

is a half-caste canvas/ explain yuself

wha yu mean

when yu say half-caste

yu mean when light an shadow mix in de sky

is a half-caste weather/

well in dat case england weather

nearly always half-caste in fact some o dem cloud half-caste till dem overcast

so spiteful dem dont want de sun pass ah rass/

explain yuself

wha yu mean when yu say half-caste

yu mean tchaikovsky

sit down at dah piano

an mix a black key wid a white key is a half-caste symphony/

Explain yuself

wha yu mean

Ah listening to yu wid de keen half of mih ear

Ah lookin at yu wid de keen

half of mih eye

and when I'm introduced to yu I'm sure you'll

understand

why I offer yu half-a-hand an when I sleep at night

I close half-a-eye

77

consequently when I dream

I dream half-a-dream

an when moon begin to glow I half-caste human being

cast half-a-shadow but yu must come back tomorrow wid de whole of yu eye

an de whole of yu ear an de whole of yu mind

an I will tell yu de other half

of my story

© John Agard

Dear God

get me out of here:

let me go somewhere else where I can fight the evil

which surrounds me here

and which I am forbidden to fight

—but do not take from me my anger my indignation at injustice

so that I may continue to burn

to right it or destroy.

Oh I know I have asked for this before in other predicaments

and found myself most wildly involved

But if it be possible

and conformable to your will dear God,

get me out of here.

© Dennis Brutus

ADOLESCENCE II (by Rita Dove)

Although it is night, I sit in the bathroom, waiting. Sweat prickles behind my knees, the baby-breasts are alert.

Venetian blinds slice up the moon; the tiles quiver in pale strips.

Then they come, the three seal men with eyes as round As dinner plates and eyelashes like sharpened tines.

They bring the scent of licorice. One sits in the wash bowl,

One on the bathtub edge; one leans against the door.

"Can you feel it yet?" they whisper.

78

I don't know what to say, again. They chuckle,

Patting their sleek bodies with their hands. "Well, maybe next time." And they rise,

Glittering like pools of ink under moonlight, And vanish. I clutch at the ragged holes

They leave behind, here at the edge of darkness. Night rests like a ball of fur on my tongue.

© Rita Dove

False Tooth (by Julius Chingono)

A false tooth

got lost during a tongue dance

that was misty

and full of froth. It was found holding

on to a rotting gum.

A false tooth also smiles

when real teeth smile

do they have any feelings?

Are you aware all those people died to make certain

you lost the election?

COCKROACHES —Julius Chingono

Two cockroaches met

talked of their experiences since they parted one big wingless cockroach

told the other cockroach that the hotel

they used to stay in was no more

suitable for habitation for the floors were

well scrubbed and shiny

cavities filled and plastered

walls were sparkling in new paint

sinks and cupboards

glittered in enamel. "The new environment

was too dry."

79

The wingless cockroach complained

"Often made me restless."

I came out through a keyhole

weak but determined to escape.

__________________

LOST A VERSE

—Julius Chingono

I was immersed

in working a poem

when an emergent business man whom I shared a park bench with

received a call

a business call I presumed.

He borrowed the pen

I was scribbling with

I lost a verse he got an order.

____________

QUEUES —Julius Chingono

There are queues many queues cheeky rowdy bread queues

disjointed tension charged sugar queues

bumper to bumper fuel warlike mealie meal queues

anxiety mobbed telephone queues

sick winding hospital queues

deathly silent mortuary queues yet the longest but invisible queue is the queue to the queue.

THE BLUE WALL

—Joyce Odam, Sacramento

(after LADY IN BLUE, 1939—Tamara De Lempicka)

There is a sadness that holds a woman close. She calls it mood—colors it blue,

sits within until the blue adheres.

The blue is a wall—

flat and

80

shadowless. It fastens to her like a painting.

Her face does not give you more than this. She will not let you find her eyes

with yours. She folds her arms

and looks into a receding distance from which she may or may not return.

Whatever you would ask will not be answered.

The blue wall guards against this,

protects her from invasion— whispers to her—reminds her of its power,

pulls her closer and closer.

_________________

CONSTELLATION

—Joyce Odam

(after Dusk by Ben Shawn)

She glides by the long soft wall of twilight with its

graffiti of stars. She pulls her cloak close to her face and has a hard time holding its folds in place. She is

that vague white movement in the dusk—moving so slowly one might not think she is moving at all.

The wall is a long one; she is trying to reach the other

end of it, before she is seen, before she is recognized.

She is from another sleep in someone else’s dream.

She cannot find the night she started from. She is

losing definition and starting to blend into the wall. three stars have fastened to her robe, thinking her part

of the sky. Still, she hides in her cloak, as if invisible.

_________________

BEHIND THE GREEN WALLS

—Patrica Pashby, Sacramento

The ER is crowded and they keep coming, filling all the chairs,

leaning against the grungy walls.

Confusion and fear come in quietly,

huddle in the corner, whispering.

81

Worry and anger push through the doors,

letting them slam behind them.

Suffering and pain whimper softly, louder sobs coming without warning.

Resignation and defeat sit alone, slumped, heads down, eyes averted.

Patience and tolerance stand outside on the stairs, smoking, staring down at their feet.

Loving kindness drives by, glances at the no-parking signs,

makes a U-turn and moves on down the street.

_________________

WALLS

—Michelle Kunert, Sacramento

A mid-17th-century proverb says, "Good fences make good neighbors." My parents had neighbors they got along great with for years

until they got a rowdy dog that practically destroyed the property line fence

The divorced mom with kids mostly left the lab mix alone all day Out of boredom it attacked and chewed through the wooden beams in between

Finally when the dog punched through its timbers into my parents' yard Well, that was the end of friendly relations and "war" with them began since the fence’s weathering couldn't let it hold up to such abuse

Most insulting was that the neighbors would not pay for it to be mended for they were renters and my parents were property owners

So hence, the fence fell into being entirely my parents' responsibility

even though they weren't the ones at fault for causing the damage Meanwhile as the neighbors neglected the dog

they outright refused offers to give "Buddy" to someone else

who could provide him plenty of roaming space

rather than the suburban plot he'd outgrown from puppyhood Buddy refused to be contained within such walls as such a tame pet So the dog regularly busted its way out of their adjacent front gate

and threatened to attack others, including an elderly lady living next door (his owners even bailed him out of the pound though they wouldn't "walk" him!)

Perhaps prayers to stay at peace with his owners were answered

when these neighbors decided to move rather than, likely, end up in court…

THERE ARE DREAMS TODAY—

—Chrys Mollett, Angels Camp

Dog, don't bark.

Phone, don't ring.

I rise and stretch slowly. Don't shake em' out.

They're the dewy placenta surrounding my sleep.

82

I let them dry out on the page—

Gently revealing themselves.

And the worlds they want me to remember...

__________________ DREAMS

are a painful experience

away from myself

reminding me of things things that I don't have

of desired destiny

of love far away from my reach

of a broken heart of life yet to be lived

and of all others of my dream.

—Tinashe Muchuri, Zimbabwe

I AM THE ONLY ONE LEFT

all the others have left. they accuse you of barrenness

they want fruits of your womb.

I love the comfort you offer

I am free I am not scared of anything I love you

no matter what they say I am the only one left

all the others have left.

—Tinashe Muchuri

__________________

ONE WAY —Tinashe Muchuri

people

trees

grass animals

birds

fish

creatures rocks

water

in the soil all sink.

__________________

83

A WIFE'S PRAYER

—Tinashi Muchuri

God, when you commanded my men to work hard on the soil

and to eat the fruits of his lies did you mean

he will forget

his children and wife and eats fruits of his sweat

away from us?

__________________

YOU, ME, US

—Tinashe Muchuri

i am talking about me

to myself

you!

i am speaking about you

to me myself.

i am screaming about myself to me

about you.

i am not alone.

you are not alone. we are together.

i am you.

you are me.

we are one. COIN TOSS

—Patricia Pashby, Sacramento

I float slowly

down through the frothy fountain

to the darkness below,

settling among the coins

that are buried in the algae-covered layers

of fragmented fantasies.

__________________

84

THE WORDLESS POEM

—Richard Zimmer

A poem should be wordless

as the flight of birds. —Archibald MacLeish

A poet spends dark, comfortless night in the room of a wayside inn. An owl,

by his window, hooted and screeched

all night, denying him his needful sleep.

After the weary overnight’s stay

the poet starts to write a poem

unfettered by any rhyme or form, and thought impossible to make.

He creates a wordless poem…not trusted to the tongue, but conveyed

only by a nod, a shrug, and a look,

punctuated with a wink or frown.

__________________

MOVIE TIME (A Fantasy)

—Richard Zimmer The movie, Casablanca, was on TV.

I decided to step right into the film. The actors were ignoring me, as if I

wasn’t there, so I ordered a martini

at Rick’s bar. I told them to use vodka, not gin…my usual. I tapped Sam on

the shoulder, telling him to play, As

Time Goes By. He frowned and said,

Rick doesn’t like that song. I shrugged and said that the Hunchback, in that other old film, rang the bells of Notre

Dame for me, but Sam wasn’t buying it.

___________________

THE CHICKEN OR THE EGG?

—Richard Zimmer

Which came first? It was the chicken, I say.

By some strange quirk,

It happened this way…

The chicken came first,

85

from out of pure matter,

appearing on earth,

and this much I gather…

Out of pure matter a chicken had come. A wise Creator made an egg-bearing one, that went forth and multiplied,

and led to the beginning of Kentucky Fried.

__________________

THIS IS ONLY A TEST

—Richard Zimmer

The makers of the Atomic Bomb were unsure of what its test results

could bring…perhaps even a chain

reaction that would destroy the earth.

They code-named the first A-test

Trinity, after John Donne’s poem,

"Holy Sonnet XIV"…

Batter my heart, three-personed

God…break, blow, burn, and make me new.

__________________

THE PRACTICAL PIGEON (and the Seagull who dreams)

—Richard Zimmer

Patty Pigeon, head bobbing up and

down, walks with a sure-footed strut.

She’s a practical pigeon, and no one

can ever put anything over on her. Sammy Seagull sleepily pecks the

ground for food. He’s a dreamer… not prone to worry about things…

lets the chips fall where they may.

Charlie, the caustic crow, always

likes to stir things up. He says,

A gull and a pigeon—both words

mean someone who’s an easy mark.

The crow then hops over to Sammy

Seagull, and says, You, my pal, have the right idea. It takes a dreamer, like

you to get by in this impractical world.

86

EMPIRE OF DREAMS

—Charles Simic

On the first page of my dreambook It's always evening In an occupied country.

Hour before the curfew. A small provincial city.

The houses all dark.

The store-fronts gutted.

I am on a street corner

Where I shouldn't be.

Alone and coatless I have gone out to look

For a black dog who answers to my whistle.

I have a kind of halloween mask Which I am afraid to put on.

DISTANT HOWLING

—Miroslav Holub

In Alsace,

on July 6, 1885, a rabid dog knocked Joseph Meister down

and bit him fourteen times. Meister was the first patient

saved by Pasteur's vaccine, in thirteen

gradually increased doses

of weakened virus.

Pasteur died of ictus

ten years later.

Fifty years later the watchman Meister

committed suicide when the Germans

occupied Pasteur's Institute

including the poor dogs.

Only the virus

never got involved.

WHAT ELSE

—Miroslav Holub

What else to do

but drive a small dog

87

out of yourself

with a stick?

Scruff bristling with fright

he huddles against the wall, crawls in the domestic zodiac, limps,

bleeding from the muzzle.

He would eat out of your hand

but that's no use.

What else

is poetry

but killing that small dog in yourself?

And all around the barking, barking, the hysterical barking

of cats.

______________________

THE BOMB

—Miroslav Holub

Murder in the lithosphere. Clay burst from the rock, fire flowed from the clay.

At the base of the crater

a naked, tender, loving

frog's heart still beats.

_______________________

BEHIND THE HOUSE —Miroslav Holub

Behind the house the cracked pots of human fate,

the child's scooter, wise in its old age.

On the clothesline, a cloud of elderly breath. Nitrogen oxide. A drop of blood.

And in the shed, in a heap,

torn rags, rusted rasps and ratchets, new regrets, old quarrels and angels.

WHAT SHE WANTED —Pascale Petit

88

What she wanted was to return

to the original rainforest

hear water pushing

through the sapwood and leaves eating light

as she wanted to eat light.

She knew her nature

was to be water, not wood.

She knew there was a grove

of vertical rivers

of roaring waterfall-trees,

and a grove of whirlpool-trees

with vortices she could dive through,

past the hollow years of her life

right back to the roots.

______________________

—Medusa

Medusa encourages poets of all ilk and ages to send their poetry, photos and art, and announcements of Northern California poetry events to

kathykieth@hotmail.com for posting on this daily Snake blog. Rights remain with the poets. Previously-published poems are okay for Medusa’s Kitchen, as long as

you own the rights. (Please cite publication.)

posted by Kathy Kieth @ 8:31 AM

Tuesday, November 28, 2006 The Moon With a Serpent's Mouth

THE GARDEN OF LOVE —William Blake

I went to the Garden of Love, And saw what I never had seen:

A Chapel was built in the midst,

Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,

And 'Thou shalt not' writ over the door;

So I turn'd to the Garden of Love That so many sweet flowers bore;

89

And I saw it was filled with graves,

And tomb-stones where flowers should be;

And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds, And binding with briars my joys & desires.

GACELA OF THE DARK DEATH —Federico Garcia Lorca

I want to sleep the dream of the apples,

to withdraw from the tumult of cemeteries,

I want to sleep the dream of that child who wanted to cut his heart on the high seas.

I don't want to hear again that the dead do not lose their blood,

that the putrid mouth goes on asking for water. I don't want to learn of the tortures of the grass,

nor of the moon with a serpent's mouth

that labors before dawn.

I want to sleep awhile,

awhile, a minute, a century;

but all must know that I have not died; that there is a stable of gold in my lips;

that I am the small friend of the West wind;

that I am the immense shadow of my tears.

Cover me at dawn with a veil, because dawn will throw fistfuls of ants at me, and wet with hard water my shoes

so that the pincers of the scorpion slide.

For I want to sleep the dream of the apples,

to learn a lament that will cleanse me of the earth; for I want to live with that dark child

who wanted to cut his heart on the high seas.

(translated from the Spanish by Stephen Spender and J.L. Gili) _______________________

GACELA OF THE FLIGHT

—Federico Garcia Lorca

I have lost myself in the sea many times

with my ear full of freshly cut flowers,

with my tongue full of love and agony.

I have lost myself in the sea many times as I lost myself in the heart of certain children.

There is no one who in giving a kiss does not feel the smile of faceless people,

and no one who in touching a newborn child

90

forgets the motionless skulls of horses.

Because the roses seach in the forehead for a hard landscape of bone

and the hands of man have no other purpose than to imitate the roots below the earth.

As I lose myself in the heart of certain children, I have lost myself in the sea many times.

Ignorant of the water I go seeking

a death full of light to consume me.

(translated by Stephen Spender and J.L. Gili)

GACELA OF UNFORESEEN LOVE —Federico Garcia Lorca

No one understood the perfume of the dark magnolia of your womb.

No one knew that you tormented

a hummingbird of love between your teeth.

A thousand Persian ponies fell asleep

in the moonlit plaza of your forehead,

while through four nights I embraced your waist, enemy of the snow.

Between plaster and jasmines, your glance was a pale branch of seeds.

I sought in my heart to give you the ivory letters that say always,

always, always: garden of my agony, your body elusive always,

the blood of your veins in my mouth,

your mouth already lightless for my death.

(translated from the Spanish by W.S. Merwin)

_______________________

GACELA OF THE TERRIBLE PRESENCE

—Federico Garcia Lorca

I want the water reft from its bed,

I want the wind left without valleys.

I want the night left without eyes

and my heart without the flower of gold.

And the oxen to speak with great leaves

and the earthworm to perish of shadow.

91

And the teeth of the skull to glisten

and the yellows to overflow the silk.

I can see the duel of the wounded night writhing in battle with noon.

I resist a setting of green venom and the broken arches where time suffers.

But do not illumine your clear nude like a black cactus open in the reeds.

Leave me in an anguish of dark planets,

but do not show me your cool waist.

(translated by W.S. Merwin)

92

STEMS

—Denise Levertov

(after Jules Supervielle)

A poplar tree under the stars, what can it do. And the bird in the poplar tree

dreaming, his head tucked into

far-and-near exile under his wing—

what can either of them in their confused alliance of

leaves and feathers

do to avert destiny?

Silence and the

ring of forgetting

protect them until the moment when the sun rises

and the memory with it.

Then the bird

breaks with his beak the thread of dream within him,

and the tree unrolls

the shadow that will guard it throughout the day.

______________________

THE WILLOWS OF MASSACHUSETTS —Denise Levertov

Animal willows of November in pelt of gold enduring when all else

has let go all ornament

and stands naked in the cold.

Cold shine of sun on swamp water, cold caress of slant beam on bough, gray light on brown bark.

Willows—last to relinquish a leaf, curious, patient, lion-headed, tense

with energy, watching

the serene cold through a curtain of tarnished strands.

SELF-PORTRAIT WITH MONKEY AND PARROT

—Pascale Petit

I who painted this with brushes of flame

cannot tell you where I have been this morning. But I can't silence Bonito.

He perches just below my left ear, repeating

93

sounds he learnt form the sun, when he flew

into its core. Fulang-Chang went with him,

swinging through the canopies of fire forests, searching for the tree that burns

at the centre of my life. These gold leaves are the few he brought back— they still hum many years

after my body has cooled. And you— how long will you listen to these colours

before you hear the language of light?

________________________

SKINS

—Pascale Petit

I am sewing the skins of birds end to end.

Snakeskins, woodskins, even the skin on water must be dried, conserved, worn.

I am wearing my grandmother's spirits.

Her skin was rough from too much work—

I flay a tree, proof the bark for the river. Her skin was soft from too much rain

but I cannot wear water.

So I have come to the world's loudest storm to hear her sing. The sky-skin rips.

Her cheeks appear, wrinkled with lightning. ________________________

THE STRAIT-JACKETS

—Pascale Petit

I lay the suitcase on Father's bed

and unzip it slowly, gently.

Inside, packed in cloth strait-jackets

lie forty live hummingbirds tied down in rows, each tiny head cushioned on a swaddled body.

I feed them from a flask of sugar water, inserting every bill into the pipette,

then unwind their bindings

so Father can see their changing colours as they dart around his room.

They hover inches from his face

as if he's a flower, their humming

just audible above the oxygen recycler. For the first time since I've arrived

he's breathing easily, the cannula

attached to his nostrils almost slips out. I don't know how long we sit there

but when I next glance at his face

94

he's asleep, lights from their feathers

still playing on his eyelids and cheeks.

It takes me hours to catch them all and wrap them in their strait-jackets.

I work quietly, he's in such a deep sleep he doesn't wake once.

AFTER READING HAIKU, I STEP OUTSIDE AND CONTEMPLATE

THREE PINK DOGWOOD BLOSSOMS

—Shawn Pittard, Sacramento

1.

A scrub jay hunts for insects below the half-stare of our garden Buddha. Its gray legs and black beak sift through a shroud of scattered blossoms. I sit under the

dogwood tree, sketch gestures of its supple limbs with a yellow stub of pencil—

sharpened to a crisp, fine point by my pocketknife’s small blade.

2.

Issa wrote—

What a strange thing!

to be alive beneath cherry blossoms.

3.

When she was too weak to walk outside, my wife’s grandmother watched the dogwood tree bloom from her kitchen table. While her hatred of the color pink

was fierce, she would tolerate its presence on her tree each spring. “Wait until

fall,” she would say. “The leaves turn a wonderful rust red.”

EATING POETRY

—Rumi

My poems resemble the bread of Egypt—one night Passes over it, and you can't eat it any more.

So gobble them down now, while they're still fresh,

Before the dust of the world settles on them.

Where a poem belongs is here, in the warmth of the chest;

Out in the world it dies of cold.

You've seen a fish—put him on dry land, He quivers for a few minutes, and then is still.

And even if you eat my poems while they're still fresh, You still have to bring forward many images yourself.

95

Actually, friend, what you're eating is your own imagination.

These poems are not just some old sayings and saws.

(translated by Robert Bly)

NOVEMBER GEESE —David Humphreys, Stockton

About three weeks ago you heard them

for the first time calling in the clouds

above you and then again ever since

occasionally in different places like the

front door this morning in the dark as you reached down for the fog-wrapped

newspaper. A few days ago it was in the rain, lovely sound cutting time’s fabric with the saw

teeth of seamstress scissors, cutting like a

memory of hip-waders in muddy rice fields

setting decoys before dawn in the smell of

Pop’s pipe tobacco. The sound of geese is

like loons haunting the Maine woods hung like a portrait above the living room piano.

96

The year will be over soon,

But I'm still here in my little hut.

Cold autumn rain falls sadly, And leaves pile up on the temple steps.

I pass time absent-mindedly reading sutras And chanting some old poems. Suddenly a child appears and says,

"Come, let's go to the village together."

—Ryokan

________________________

At dusk

I often climb To the peak of Kugami.

Deer bellow,

Their voices Soaked up by

Piles of maple leaves

Lying undisturbed at

The foot of the mountain.

—Ryokan

______________________

A VISIT TO MR. FUJI'S VILLA —Ryokan

It's several miles outside the town

And I walked there together with a woodsman

Along a meandering footpath through rows of verdant pines. In the valley around us, sweet-smelling wild plum blossoms.

Every time I visit, I gain something new,

And there I feel truly at ease.

The fish in his pond are big as dragons, And the surrounding forest is still the day long. The inside of his home is full of treasures:

Volumes of books scattered about! Inspired, I loosen my robe, browse through the books

And then compose my own verse.

At twilight I walk along the eastern corridor Where I'm greeted again by a little flock of spring birds.

(Today's poems by Ryokan were translated from the Japanese by John Stevens.)

EVERYTHING CHANGES

—Bertold Brecht

Everything changes. You can make

A fresh start with your final breath.

97

But what has happened has happened. And the water

You once poured into the wine cannot be

Drained off again.

What has happened has happened. The water You once poured into the wine cannot be Drained off again, but

Everything changes. You can make A fresh start with your final breath.